New York personal assistant guilty in $10 million elder fraud

A New York woman who worked as a personal assistant pleaded guilty to wire fraud on Wednesday for a scheme in which she stole $10 million from her elderly employers, one of whom was a retired Salomon Brothers investment banker who died two years before the fraud was stopped.

The woman, Catalina Corona, blew some of the stolen money on luxury goods from Gucci, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, and to pay off her credit card debt, prosecutors said.

Corona, 62, faces a maximum possible prison sentence of 30 years in the case, the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

Corona was accused of using fraudulent checks and impersonating her employers to defraud Richard Schmeelk and his wife, Priscilla, out of millions of dollars from 2017, when she began working for them, through 2024.

Richard Schmeelk died at age 97 in May 2022 — but Corona kept on looting his widow’s accounts, according to court records.

The Schmeelks were identified as Corona’s victims by a prosecutor during the plea hearing on Wednesday.

Richard Schmeelk, a World War II veteran, worked for 40 years at Salomon Brothers and was on the bank’s executive committee. After he retired from the investment bank, he co-founded CAI Managers, a merchant banking firm.

“In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI bestowed upon Dick the Knighthood in the Order of St. Gregory The Great, for his work on behalf of the Catholic Church,” his obituary noted.

Richard Schmeelk, who was a member of President Donald Trump‘s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, was previously the victim of another, similar fraud by his then-personal executive secretary, according to court records.

In that case, the executive secretary was found to have diverted “numerous checks that he had signed in order to pay his and his family’s expenses … to [the secretary’s] own use,” a New York federal appeals court noted in 1999.

The secretary, Bebe Fazia Laljie, was convicted in 1998 at a Manhattan federal court of numerous accounts of mail and bank fraud after a jury trial presided over by now-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who sentenced her to 46 months in prison and to pay restitution of $505,532.

In the latest case, court filings say, Corona wrote hundreds of checks from the Schmeelk’s bank accounts out to cash, payable to herself, and also transferred funds directly from the victims’ accounts to her own, according to court filings.

The fraud was first discovered in April 2024 when a bank representative reached out to Priscilla Schmeelk over a suspicious $1,500 check, prosecutors said.

A criminal complaint said that Corona spent more than $1 million of stolen funds at Louis Vuitton, hundreds of thousands of dollars at both Cartier and Gucci, and $305,000 on Apple merchandise.

“Today’s guilty plea means the defendant has been held accountable for a calculated scheme that siphoned nearly $10 million from the very employers who trusted her,” U.S Attorney Joseph Nocella, Jr. said in the statement.

“Our Office will continue to pursue those who exploit positions of trust for personal gain and ensure they face the consequences for their deception and fraud,” Nocella said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has said that in 2024, there were nearly $5 billion in losses due to elder fraud from more than 147,000 complaints.

The actual number of victims and losses is likely higher as many victims may not report the crime or know they’ve been scammed, the agency says.